


The Bad Boy Who Didn't Care

by elviaprose



Category: David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 06:26:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13048362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elviaprose/pseuds/elviaprose
Summary: It is devil of a thing to be worshipped by a man worth ten of you. No end of trouble and no end of pleasure. Though he had only known it to happen to him once, James Steerforth was careless enough to put it down as a general truth. He thought it again and again, that day when he first seduced David Copperfield.





	The Bad Boy Who Didn't Care

**Author's Note:**

  * For [likeadeuce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/gifts).



It is devil of a thing to be worshipped by a man worth ten of you. No end of trouble and no end of pleasure. Though he had only known it to happen to him once, James Steerforth was careless enough to put it down as a general truth. He thought it again and again, that day when he first seduced David Copperfield. 

“My dear Steerforth! I wasn’t expecting you!” David said warmly, opening his door wide to him and clasping his hand with great enthusiasm. 

“My dear Daisy,” he replied in turn. “You must stop us loitering at the top of these stairs and let me in at once!”

David flushed, the poor thing, and moved out of the the way, and though they were David’s own rooms, Steerforth led him back into them with a masterful hand at his elbow. 

It was the easiest thing in the world to Steerforth to be charming, and always had been. He never put his foot wrong, and could over-master just about anyone he pleased, either with cruelty or kindness. He was rotten, as he was the first to admit (well, perhaps the second, after Rosa Dartle), but rottenness had no bearing on his knowledge of how to be winning. He had simply always known how to do it, without knowing why he knew, or how. 

Copperfield, who was to be his conquest, was at once more and less charming than he. Even Steerforth, cynical as he was, scoundrel that he was, simply couldn’t help but feel more than fond of those quick warm eyes of his and that small, neat frame that David loved to dress up with overly bright waistcoats. What a friend he found in David, who dreamed of Steerforth’s fame and success and joy with twenty times the energy that Steerforth himself dreamed of it; who took his part against Rosa’s all too sharp observations of his character and believed utterly in his kindness and goodness; who laughed at his wit, a true, real laugh, but also a deliberate gift to him, a gesture of his love and admiration. 

The upper and lower classes of society both would always find something to be laughed at in David, Steerforth knew, where they never would in Steerforth. Copperfield was too much in earnest about his passions and his notions (which were certainly intelligent enough--that wasn’t the trouble), too quick to show his pride, too ready to speak, too determined to try to be pleasing and too easy to please. In short, too easy to set oneself above in a thousand ways. Steerforth was certain that in spite of this, David was already his better, and would only become more so as they grew older.

It was early morning, that day, which was a Hilary Term Saturday. “I am come from Oxford to butter up your toast for you, and then we’ll go out riding. And then you shall persuade me to plunge myself into that dreadfully cold Roman bath of yours up the street, and then we’ll come in and light a fire and then we’ll do Lord knows what,” said Steerforth.

“Oh, that will be wonderful!” said Copperfield. He was always so ready to enjoy whatever Steerforth offered.

“Oh, and I’ve brought you a little present,” Steerforth said, drawing it out. 

It was a heavy book, bound in fine leather. When David took it in his hands, he saw a printed image of great familiarity to him: it showed two men strolling together down a long road. Behind them was a quaint little house, and out of the chimney came a homey poof of smoke. 

“Oh, Steerforth, well remembered! How I loved _Roderick Random_ as a boy. And a fine edition it is, too, finer than the one I’d got then or the one I have now,” David said.

“How could I forget, when I demanded that you tell me the whole long story from memory, nights and mornings, when we were in school. I was a hard little tyrant, and you were my Scheherazade. What a sleepy thing I made of you, nodding over your books from doing it. I expect you got beaten all sorts of ways for it.” That, Steerforth did not quite remember, as he had a way of forgetting such things.

"It was willingly done, Steerforth, always. But what a mess I made of the story,” David said, laughing.

The bread they ate tasted twice as good to David that morning, and Steerforth did indeed butter it for him.

**

Steerforth had taught David to ride while David was staying with him at his mother’s, which meant David was new to the practice still, and a little awkward about it. He would occasionally wobble as they rode the cold, sandy track of Hyde Park’s Rotten Row. Still, he was as determined as a man could be, and even his precarious position could not prevent him talking at length to Steerforth of the Doctors’ Commons and his early days with Mr. Spenlow there, and how they’d been to see _The Stranger_ , which had cut him up so dreadfully he’d hardly recognized himself after. 

“What a little ‘Player King’ Daisy is, after all. What’s Hecuba to him, or him to Hecuba?” Steerforth said, laughing at him fondly. “Such deep feelings, and over nothing.”

“Oh, had I your motive and your cue for passion!” David declaimed. He wobbled a little in his enthusiasm, and flushed, but after a moment he was able to find as much pleasure in the joke as anyone could, despite being the butt of it.

“Have I motive and cue?" Steerforth asked, when David had settled on his horse again. "You seem to be letting Hamlet’s verse run away with you and talking a lot of nonsense. I’m sure I have neither.”

“Oh yes, Steerforth, you have. You have motive enough in that anyone you loved would be made so terribly happy, and your cue is that you’re of just an age and position to fall wildly, madly, wonderfully in love with a beautiful lady,” David replied, half in earnest.

“Ah, Daisy,” said Steerforth, with a turn of his mouth, and for a few minutes they rode slowly and quietly together across the hard brown earth. 

Steerforth rarely allowed a sad silence, but once before in David's presence he had brooded in such a way, and now he did so again.

“In any event, you’re perfectly right about the Doctors’ Commons, Steerforth," David said briskly at last, returning to the subject that had begun their conversation. "It seems it will be a cozy sort of life for me.” 

“Oh, very good then,” Steerforth said, and meant it, and thought how he truly did want Copperfield to be happy. He wondered if he would aid in that happiness, in the course of their acquaintance, or do quite the opposite.

**  
When David’s hair curled softly from the damp as they warmed up beside the fire, Steerforth stretched out his legs and said,

“Give me your present, and I’ll repay the favors you did me long ago, just a little, by reading it to you.”

After David had brought it to him with a light step, he flipped through it, giving every appearance of carelessness, and began to read:

_He put into my hand Petronius Arbiter, and asked my opinion of his wit and manner. I told him, that, in my opinion, he wrote with great ease and vivacity, but was withal so lewd and indecent that he ought to find no quarter or protection among people of morals and taste._

David had heard Steerforth read before, but that had been when he had acted as an amateur sort of teacher in the absence of Mr. Mell. Now he read in a more intimate register. He drawled the words out, letting them linger and curl like that homey smoke around David.

_“I own,” replied the earl, “that his taste in love is generally decried, and indeed condemned by our laws; but perhaps that may be more owing to prejudice and misapprehension than to true reason and deliberation. The best man among the ancients is said to have entertained that passion; one of the wisest of their legislators has permitted the indulgence of it in his commonwealth; the most celebrated poets have not scrupled to avow it. At this day it prevails not only over all the East, but in most parts of Europe; in our own country, it gains ground apace, and in all probability will become in a short time a more fashionable vice than simple fornication. Indeed there is something to be said in vindication of it; for, notwithstanding the severity of the law against offenders in this way, it must be confessed that the practice of this passion is unattended with that curse and burthen upon society which proceeds from a race of miserable and deserted bastards, who are either murdered by their parents, deserted to the utmost want and wretchedness, or bred up to prey upon the commonwealth and it likewise prevents the debauchery of many a young maiden, and the prostitution of honest men’s wives..._

Steerforth was typically not the sort to give much credit to anything he found in a book, but one day while strolling past a shop that sold the things, he had been taken with the notion to have a look at Young Copperfield's favorite. Leafing through old _Roderick_ , the passage he now read aloud to David had caught his eye. 

It was so plainly, so baldly put. Could it really be so simple as that, he’d thought? Steerforth had been taken with Little Em’ly. He had noted her lively beauty, and her cleverness. She felt herself a little too good for the life before her, and he had noted that too, with tender interest and cruel meanness both. For her part, the kindness and hardness in him both together exerted a kind of power over her. He could see it did, and he had found himself already plotting out how he could have her. Which, of course, meant ruining her, for tried though he might, he could not entirely persuade himself that he would marry her after he had made her love him. 

The girl would suffer, and David would never forgive him. To lose David’s love would be a hard thing, perhaps the hardest thing of all to him. He knew it ought not to be the loss of David's good opinion that he would mind the most, for the harm to David would hardly be the greatest wrong done, but he could not help that. Worse, he knew if he got the better of his own urges and spared pretty little Em’ly, he would sooner or later find himself on the brink the same crime once again, and again, and so on until he really did it. 

On the other hand, he had wanted to sod David Copperfield. It was not so uncommon a sin. In general or, he thought likely, in the particular case of Copperfield, who seemed to be a man born to it. And as Roderick's Earl so bluntly put it, indulging in that desire might well keep him from worse sins. With a wayward, careless spirit like his, he supposed he could not hope for better than to keep himself out of one spot of trouble by courting another. If he scrupled, it was not to commit any such prohibited act but because he liked Daisy so well. Knowing he was not David's equal in the ways that really counted, he feared he could only bring them both grief in the end, by such a courtship. And yet it would be so sweet... 

And so, in the present moment he continued reading aloud:

_"...not to mention the consideration of health, which is much less liable to be impaired in the gratification of this appetite, than in the exercise of common venery, which, by ruining the constitutions of our young men, has produced a puny progeny that degenerates from generation to generation. Nay, I have been told, that there is another motive perhaps more powerful than all these, that induces people to cultivate this inclination; namely, the exquisite pleasure attending its success._

David’s lovely eyes had grown wider, and his face flushed.

“I think he talks a lot of sense, don’t you, Daisy?”

David began to speak, but Steerforth held up his hand to shush him and read a little further.

_After I had enjoyed a long audience, I happened to look at my watch, in order to regulate my motions by it; and his lordship, observing the chased case, desired to see the device, and examine the exception, which he approved with some expressions of admiration._

“Could I see your watch, Daisy?” Steerforth asked.

“Of course,” David said decidedly, and he drew it from his pocket, unfastened it, and gave it over with trembling hands. 

Steerforth took the watch in his own hands.

“It ought to be finer,” he murmured, running his fingers over and over the front and back of it. “It is not so fine as old Roderick’s. I want you to have all the best things. The property of my property ought to be of the best. You’ll have a better one from me, but for now I must return this to you.” 

He saw the watch safely home to David’s pocket, and just when it seemed he would draw his hand away, he stroked it down David’s canary yellow waistcoat. 

“Let us find out if it really is an exquisite pleasure, shall we?” Steerforth said. “You couldn’t be more lovely if you were the prettiest English Rose that ever bloomed, instead of just my Daisy. I’ve always thought so.”

At this juncture David kissed Steerforth with such passion that Steerforth was quite surprised at it. He had expected more bashfulness from him, but David was quite committed to the act, in his tender, fresh way. Then he pulled back and pressed their foreheads together, in a curious gesture Steerforth found almost too lovely to be tolerated. David put his hand over Steerforth’s and guided it to the buttons of the waistcoat, imploring him to undo them with a degree of decision that would have made his Aunt Betsey, known to carry whip in hand as she rode through town, quite proud. At this point, Steerforth wavered. It was no good thing in him, but it was a fact that forcefulness of spirit checked him in a course where innocence and weakness would not. He took David’s impatient hand in his. He stroked it, then let it go, and stroked David’s face instead. 

“Don’t let me bully you. Are you certain you’d like to try such a thing, with me? I am not--”

David did not wait to see what Steerforth would say he was not, but broke in strongly and firmly. 

“Yes. I never quite knew it, but this is entirely what I want, Steerforth. Show me how it’s done.”

“Well, I’m fresh to the practice myself, if you’ll believe it. Only I like you so terribly well I couldn’t help seducing you.”

David smiled at him. “Can it really be true, Steerforth?” he asked, without any anger or judgment, but more knowingly than Steerforth might have expected. Steerforth thought that perhaps his Daisy knew a little what he was not, after all. He felt warm and forgiven, though it so happened that he had been entirely honest.

“It’s perfectly true. You’re incomparably winning.” 

They undressed each other playfully, and Steerforth had never before felt less lonely in his life. How David trusted himself to him, how he let his body be taken. It was so easy, and yet not too easy, as so many things were to Steerforth. Steerforth had never worried in his life about doing anything awkwardly, and he didn’t worry now. David was not afraid, because his heart had never been broken. Neither had Steerforth’s heart, though for quite different reasons. For both young men, it made them easy with each other. Steerforth stroked his hands over David’s body with wonder and pleasure, and David cried out with absolute joy and delight.

**

Steerforth adored David’s fresh pleasure in life, but it was not David’s childish enjoyment of the world, but his unexpected firmness that pleased Steerforth most. He had always craved and evaded a strong hand in equal measure. He found from David he could take it in better part than he ever had before. One night, before a crackling fire, when they had had a long, wonderful day together and they were talking again about how he was rather like the bad boy who didn’t care, he had laughingly suggested that David beat him like one of Creakle’s boys. Oh Steerforth, weren’t you fortunate you never were! David had laughed, but when Steerforth had insisted, David had done it and seemed to rather enjoy himself, once he got into the spirit of it. Steerforth had suggested it half in fun, but as David did it Steerforth had found he was trembling all over, in a kind of ecstasy. 

When summer came he took David to Europe with him, and enjoyed showing off his easy way with languages, and showing David all the wonders he could. 

He had known he would always be fond of David, but he had thought that his flighty mind might rebel at being even David's lover for very long. But he found that his love for him grew more and more. When David touched him he was never happier. He thought--I will never have a better chance to really love someone. 

He looked over David’s shoulder as he wrote a letter to Agnes, when they were in Venice, and saw what he wrote: 

_It is the wonder of the world. Dreamy, beautiful, inconsistent, impossible, wicked, shadowy, damnable old place. I entered it by night, and the sensation of that night and the bright morning that followed is a part of me for the rest of my existence..._

It seemed that it was him David wrote about, as much as the city. That night he wished he could die the next day, die before he ruined it all, in some pathetic way--grow restless, and take a prostitute into their bed and let David catch him at it, or do something else of equal stupidity, like leaving him without a word. And then, after they had parted, they would meet again, and David would be shocked at how slight a man Steerforth really was, and would wonder that he had ever found him worthy. He would seem to him an aging dandy, without any real brilliance or kindness or merit, and David would write a devastatingly accurate portrait of him into one of his novels or sketches, and they would avoid each other. 

When he woke up alive the next day, however, he was more hopeful. His mood was often changeable in that way. Achilles was a moody fool like him, and Patroclus was a better man, who knew when a difficult deed should be done, and how to do it. Patroclus put on Achilles’ armor and rode out when Achilles would not do it, and died. But we are not soldiers, Daisy and I, Steerforth told himself. Perhaps for us two fortunate souls, who have known a kinder life, it needn’t end that way. I have already surprised myself with him. Perhaps, day by day, I shall grow a little better in his company, and we shall grow old together, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> The letter Steerforth reads over David's shoulder is actually taken from one of Dickens' own letters about Venice.


End file.
